The Jukola Relay is about much more than orienteering
By Sanna Pulkkinen in Lapua
Last weekend saw the 59th holding of the annual Jukola Relay orienteering event, featuring teams of seven runners each. This three-day gathering, which also includes the Venla Relay for four-member women’s teams, is a great deal more than a mass run-with-a-map through the Finnish forests.
You can sense this palpably by spending a day in the competition area, which was this time in Lapua in Ostrobothnia. Jukola moves around the country each year, and will next be hosted in Tampere.
The tented villages, restaurants, food and drinks marquees, and temporary tented saunas (!) can hold an astonishing number of people, but then they need to - this year there were 900 teams taking part among the women and no fewer then 1,400 among the men. This makes for more than 13,000 competitors alone, and there were probably another 15,000 there to watch and cheer on their friends and relatives.
The arrangements run smoothly enough on the traditions of years of experience, and the orienteering enthusiasts do not complain, even at the lengthy lines for the portaloos.
Even though the sunshine that accompanied the women’s race on Saturday afternoon gives way gradually to a bitterly overnight chill, the assembled public show the necessary sisu (“guts”, “fortitude”) to stay awake through the bright June night.
Woolly hats, gloves, and sleeping bags are brought out. Some doze a bit while waiting for their turn to run, while others take their sleeping bags and head over to the “horizontal grandstand”, where they lie down to follow the competition stage-results as they come in on a big videoscreen.
Children are well represented, just as family ties are often to the fore among the actual runners. There were several teams with two generations running, and one women’s quartet boasted three generations of the same family.
There is no point in going in search of wild tent-parties around here.
This is serious stuff.
At 5 a.m. the sound of birdsong rings clearly from the forest as you walk through the otherwise silent tented village. Here and there are the beeping sounds of mobile phones going off to wake people for their turn at the relay.
The men start off en masse, their foreheads equipped with lamps reminiscent of those worn by coalminers, at around 11 p.m.on Saturday night, and the winners can be expected to come home between 6 and 7 a.m. on Sunday morning.
By that time a great many competitors will still have their share of the race ahead of them. The last anchors will totter across the line in the early afternoon, after which they will decamp and head back home, tired but happy, and start preparing for Tampere in 2008.
For the record, this year’s Jukola Relay winners were Kalevan Rasti from Finland, who came home in 7:44:16, just over four minutes ahead of Norway’s Halden SK, with the 2006 winners Vehkalahden Veikot (Finland) another minute further back in third.
Kalevan Rasti, from Joensuu, are no strangers to the podium. In fact in recent years they have dominated the male event, with wins in 2004 and 2005 and the runner-up spot last year.
They also enjoyed the distinct benefit of having Thierry Gueorgiou on their roster again. The Frenchman is widely regarded as the most talented orienteering exponent in the world today, and the multiple world champion anchored the team home with a comfortable advantage.
This year’s total race distance for the men was an impressive 75.4 kilometres.
The Venla Relay honours went to the quartet from Asikkalan Raikas, who became the first Finnish winners of the event since 2003, triumphing after 25.3 kilometres in a time of 3:08:37.
There was some drama, too, as a Swedish team - OK Linne - were disqualified while leading the field for having punched the wrong control during the third leg. The Asikkala team’s anchor, another World Champion in Minna Kauppi, was unaware of the disqualification and thought she had failed to overhaul the Swedes and would be taking only 2nd spot.
As it was, despite not running exactly a flawless race, Kauppi did enough to bring the team home seven seconds ahead of OK Skogsfalken from Sweden and half a minute clear of another Swedish team, IF Thor.
The Jukola Relay is just one of many mass long-distance sporting events that are an integral part of the Finnish calendar, summer and winter.
In February, several thousand faithfully turn out for the traditional Finlandia Ski Marathon over 60km, and later in the summer there will be “the world’s largest rowing competition” at Sulkava, again over a marathon course of approximately 60 kilometres.
These events, together with sundry other ultramarathons and things like the “Naisten Kymppi” - a 10km fun-run around Helsinki for 15,000 women each May - are quintessentially Finnish.
They are arguably much more authentic examples of the nation’s eccentricity, endurance, and participatory zeal than the Finnish gatherings that normally cross the international news threshold: sauna-sitting, air-guitar-playing, wife-carrying, mobile-phone-throwing, swamp-football-playing, or mosquito-swatting “World Championships”.
Helsingin Sanomat / Adapted from an article first published in print 18.6.2007
Links:  Sulkava Rowing Races Naisten Kymppi Fun Run Jukola Relay & Venla Relay 2007 Jukola Relay (Wikipedia) Finlandia Ski Marathon
SANNA PULKKINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
sanna.pulkkinen@hs.fi
|
| 19.6.2007 - THIS WEEK |
The Jukola Relay is about much more than orienteering
|
|
